


All that ever was and will be

by feroxargentea



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: F/M, In which Earth is not the Garden of Eden, Post Episode: s04e19-e20 Daybreak, Post-Canon, and Starbuck is not dead, and always has been, sort-of Canadian Shack, this is my headcanon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-01
Updated: 2015-11-01
Packaged: 2018-04-28 02:15:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5073541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feroxargentea/pseuds/feroxargentea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Earth is not a paradise. Starbuck is not an angel. And this is not the end.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All that ever was and will be

**Author's Note:**

> For once, a fic that wasn't written for any challenge or posted to any comms. Just an attempt to fit words to headcanon. Thank you to cj2017 for beta.

\---------------------------------------------------------

 

She focused on the squirrel thirty paces away across the clearing, tipping her bow a fraction more, the bowstring as taut as a summer’s practice could pull it. A fraction more, and—

A twig snapped behind her, and the arrowshot went wide, sending the animal skittering into the canopy.

“Gods damn it!”

She spun, knowing even before she turned what she would see, what her outflung fist would hit. The Cylon stumbled away and tripped on a root, his skull striking a tree trunk as he fell. He lay where he landed, sprawled motionless in a near-perfect facsimile of human hesitation, waiting for her to raise her bow and reach for her belt, where her spare arrows should have been.

No arrows left. She stepped forward, lowering the bow instead, pressing its tip into the skin of his neck, certain he would do nothing to stop her.

They never did anything to stop her.

His carotid artery pulsed either side of the weapon, his eyes widening with fear and longing. Every time, they just let her do this. They just let her do this, and every time their blood sprang thick with its engineered haem, congealing on her fingers like a real life given and taken. Diffident, anonymous figures, all of them, their heads dipped to hide features remarkable only for their ordinariness, features that would never have been picked out from a crowd, until a mugshot had been plastered across the fleet and the first one had been dragged bleeding to the _Gemenon Traveler_ ’s brig, defiant and cocky and terrified, acting the part he had been made for and daring her to believe him. An everyman, and no man at all.

This one wasn’t emaciated, however, as most were by now. Somewhat scrawnier than he would have been back on the baseship, but a long way from starvation. Barefoot and sunburned and sunbleached by the New Earth summer, but still mostly muscle under the filthy remnants of his clothes.

She knelt down, one knee pressed into his chest, feeling his strength held in check, his inhuman power in deliberate abeyance as he lay there, his eyes on hers. It took as little to kill one of these creatures as it would to kill a man, supposing that man chose for whatever reason not to fight back. She lifted the bow away and placed her hand on his throat, pushing down and farther down, feeling the rings of cartilage under the soft flesh give way, willing his lifeforce to struggle against hers, willing him to be the first to bite and scream and kick out against his destiny.

A little more pressure, and he tipped his head back, baring more of his warm near-human skin to her touch. She watched him close his eyes, watched him wait for release and move his lips in what might have been a prayer to his long-dead god. More pressure. Another minute would kill him, and this time he would stay down: no resurrection, no rebirth. He’d stay down, until the next time and the next time and the next, in this brave new world clotted with memories and peopled with ghosts.

She turned her face aside, spat and swore. Then she unlocked her fingers and got to her feet. The sun was already beginning to set in a blaze of azure and crimson and gold, and in this world a single lost arrow outweighed the life of a single lost clone.

She set off in the direction of her missed shot, not looking back, ignoring the soft coughing behind her, taking wide casts through the undergrowth as she searched for the bright-feathered fletches.

After a minute she could hear the rustling of footsteps as the Cylon followed her over the tinder-dry leaf litter. A heavy, deliberate tread this time: fair warning. She pointed to where she’d spotted the arrow-shaft lodged deep in the trunk of a young maple, and he reached up and pulled it out with a quick jerk of the wrist, making no pretence at effort, and handed it to her.

“You…you don’t need—” he began, his voice husky from bruising or disuse or both.

“ _What?_ ” she said. “What don’t I need? Huh?”

He flinched from her in the gesture she’d seen a thousand times since Old Earth, in Cylons and humans alike, and she realized she was wielding the arrow like the weapon it was. She lowered her arm.

“Squirrels,” he said. “You don’t need squirrels. I…I got food.” He gestured toward a rocky outcrop half a klick along the river, and now she could scent a thin twist of smoke on the veering breeze. “If you’re hungry, I…I got food.”

 

~*~*~*~

 

He didn’t wait for her. By the time she’d retrieved her backpack, he was a distant figure downstream.

“Hey!” she called, stumbling after him along the riverbank. “Hey, Cylon!”

He didn’t turn, just flinched again and kept his pace. She ran to catch up and fell into step beside him. For a while they walked in silence, tracking the twists of the river. She waited for him to ask her what she was doing there, why she was alone, but he said nothing.

Maybe he already knew. Maybe rumor had outpaced her. Laura Roslin was dead, everyone on New Earth knew that. The Old Man was gone, too. Sam was long dead, taking with him into oblivion everything that might have allowed the remainder of the fleet to build a colony free of famine and disease. The first few pioneers to arrive, that brave small band, had brought sacks of seeds with which to sow their dreams, but they’d had no swords to beat into plowshares and no understanding of the ceaseless toil and desperation of a stone-age life entered into without thought or planning. Starbuck had stood and watched the last of the colonists – the unwilling – simply lie down where they’d disembarked, prone in the dust, waiting with hard-learned indifference for New Earth to become New Caprica.

And Lee – if Lee ever came back from the mountains, he would have his own path to follow, a path that wouldn’t include her.

Maybe Leoben knew all of this already, the way he’d always claimed to know the things no one could know. Maybe the frakker talked to the trees. Maybe he dipped his fingers in the frakking _stream_.

“So, um,” she said, keeping her tone provokingly casual, “have we, y’know, _met?_ Have I killed you before?”

He glanced at her, his face neutral except for the pain in his eyes – the most human part of him, by some flaw or some genius in his design, she had never been sure which. Then he nodded toward the rock face ahead, where a dirty blanket had been strung across an overhang.

“Up there,” he said. “And no, I’m not dead. Neither are you, Kara Thrace.”

 

~*~*~*~

 

She shifted restively, perched on her haunches on the dirt floor, her bow within reach. By the time Leoben had stirred the fire into life and spitted a pair of cleaned, gutted fish over the flames, the world was falling into dusk, the landscape reduced to a few hundred yards either side of the cave mouth.

On level ground above the river’s flood-mark, she could make out where a dozen logs had been levered up with rough-hewn skids and laid crosswise to form a square, chest-high. A plot of land had been fenced off next to it and planted with potatoes, but the last of the tree trunks lay abandoned beside the skids, the earth around it already covered in a flush of weeds. To have built such a structure would have required help, even with a Cylon’s inhuman strength. Equally clearly, such help was long gone.

“A two-man job, huh?” she said, gesturing toward the cabin with her half-eaten fish. “That’s a damn shame, ’cause I don’t see any _men_ around here.”

Now that she knew to look, the signs of felling were obvious. Pale stumps in an artificial clearing, drag marks scored through the undergrowth. They must have had metal tools, whoever it was. Axes as well as saws, technically illegal in this weapons-free world. A little way downstream on a sandstone bluff there were further signs of excavation: foundations for another building, perhaps. She shaded her eyes against the setting sun. No, not foundations. Two long low mounds the length and breadth of a man, heaped with stones.

“Those…Were they Cylons?” she asked.

He exhaled in a sharp laugh, his breath clouding in the cold air, and she shrugged in acknowledgement of the question’s futility.

“One was,” he said. “Piotr was a Colonial, though. My brother and I had never left the baseship, but Piotr had had on-planet experience. He’d been a woodsman, he tried to teach us. He had no intention of dying out here.”

The mounds were identical, shaped with care and covered in boulders massive enough to keep predators out. Starbuck shivered in the gathering chill.

“So how _did_ he die?”

“Mauled too bad to save. A bear, probably. And my brother, he fell from the cliff. He, uh, he jumped from the cliff.”

He spoke in the same flat tone she’d heard again and again in those left behind by famine, by fever, by the slaughter inflicted by the new inhabitants of this new paradise where parents abandoned their children, and Cylons abandoned their siblings, and hope died crumpled at the base of cliffs. A few months ago she might have mocked him, might have told him to go pick out a new brother from the next village. That was before supplies had run low, before the Colonials had started to turn on their Cylon allies and drive them out to live or die in the wilderness.

“I’m sorry,” she said, hearing the words twist themselves reflexively into insincerity.

He shrugged. “My brother thought…he hoped that if he passed into God’s hands, he would be reunited with Piotr.”

“Yeah, right.” She threw the fish’s spine into the fire and watched it curl and shrivel. “You believe that?”

He was silent a long while, his gaze fixed on the escarpment opposite as if he could still see the tiny figure leaping and tumbling. Then he nodded toward her backpack. “You still carry your icons, Kara. What do _you_ believe?”

She reached for her pack and pulled out the deerskin bundle she’d smuggled down to the planet, bribing the inspectors to turn a blind eye to the lead figurines, just as some of the settlers had bribed them to bring in metal tools. She would have melted the spindly icons down for bullets long since, if she’d had a gun and powder to go with them. Now she unwrapped them and placed them upright on a ledge of rock, arranging them so that their fire-thrown shadows leapt and danced on the cave wall.

“The Gods are dead,” she said. “Long live the Gods.”

 

~*~*~*~

 

By the time she’d finished her second fish, she was curled up on her deerskin, lulled halfway to trustfulness by the fire’s warmth.

“So you’re what, the world’s greatest fisherman or something?” she said.

He rose and went down to the edge of the river, wading in where it widened into a pool below a small fall. He bent low, dipped his fingers slowly into the water, and held them there for a moment, his face almost touching the surface. Then he straightened, a trout thrashing in his hands, and she saw there was a long, low contraption built across the pool, a cage of lashed poles. Anything swimming with the current would fall into it along with the water, and the fish would be trapped, unable to push free.

No wonder the frakker had chosen to live by a stream. Half of his circuits had always run on symbolism, on metaphor. She watched him lower the fish gently back into the cage.

“The water’s growing cold,” he called. “Fall is coming. We’d need to go two thousand klicks south to avoid it.”

Two thousand klicks south; and south in any amount was a dirty word to the settlers of this continent. Those few who had chosen landfall in the semi-tropical regions and survived the hike northward had brought tales of a land infested with fever-carrying mosquitoes and inhabited by hostile tribes. Here in the north, though, when winter came, the rivers would freeze over and a single torn blanket wouldn’t keep gale-blown blizzards from the cave mouth.

Leoben sat back down next to her and pointed to a hollow tree near the half-finished cabin.

“See that oak? I’m making a roof for it, building a firepit at the base, turning it into a smokehouse. We should have enough smoked fish to eat, if nothing else.”

She whistled in appreciation, and he ducked his head, shy with praise. If anyone could survive in this world, though, why not him? For years she’d assumed the gleaming, pulsing Cylon ships ran themselves, until she’d seen their fleet of technicians, their maintenance crew, a thousand dirty-blond clones bent to their tasks. That first one – the one she’d beaten almost to the point of death, before Laura Roslin had stopped her – had been a comms expert, a hacker; had heard everything she’d ever said on the wire. She might have hated him just for that, if she’d needed another reason.

“We?” she said.

 

~*~*~*~

 

His hair was graying, his beard more white than fair in the firelight, and his clothes were so worn that only the seams of his cargo pants showed they had once been blue. What remained of the shirt under his flight vest had been torn at the sleeve, revealing the tattoo that his clone-line usually kept hidden, a mark eerie in its very humanness, its ink faded and smudged as if by decades of cell death and rebirth. Starbuck had to stop herself reaching out to touch it, to feel its heat and its reality, and she wondered anew at the insanity of creators who would design creatures to sweat and bleed and age. That tattoo might have been a hundred years old, a thousand, maybe even Old Earth old; or it might have been molded, pre-aged, from tissue progenitors in a resurrection pod above New Caprica three years ago.

If she asked him, he would tell her. He might even tell her the truth.

“You’re…Are you…” she began, and then stopped. _My brother and I had never left the baseship_ , he’d said. Never been to the _Galactica_ , never been to Caprica or New Caprica or Old Earth. Never walked away.

He looked up at her with his too-human smile, suffused as always with an affection she’d done nothing to earn.

“Yes. And no. Does it matter? Those memories, they’re part of the pattern. I see them, I carry them with me, even if I’m not—”

“Not what?” she said. “Not the same cell line? Not the same chip number? Not _guilty?_ I don’t know how the frak it works, and you know what? I don’t frakking care, either.”

He leaned across the embers and traced the line of her own tattoo, not touching it, his fingertips just brushing the tiny hairs above the stark, unsmudged whorls.

“I’m not him, Kara,” he said. “I’m not the one you killed.”

“Great. Great. You know what I _really_ don’t need? Absolution from a frakking toaster.”

 

~*~*~*~

 

The fire was dying, choked with ash. He pulled another blanket from his stores and draped its smoke-stiffened folds around her. Then he picked up an ax and, hefting it lightly, split a log into wedges. He placed a couple of them into the glowing embers before sitting back down and wrapping the rest of the blanket over his shoulders, propping the ax between his feet as he did so in a gesture so fluid it must have been habitual.

“Aren’t you afraid I’ll shop you?” she said, surprising a laugh out of him. Illegality had become meaningless in a world with no laws left and no one to enforce them if there had been; a world in which metal weapons meant defense, warmth, shelter. Maybe life.

She held her fingers up to the flames, watching the firelight limn the thickened nodules where the bones had knitted, crooked but stronger than before. Blood cells in their millions would be thrumming through her tissues, flushing the skin, mending molecule by molecule the contusions of on-planet life. Leoben’s hands, resting lightly on the ax handle, were scratched and bruised, too, though washed clean by the stream. She wondered what he would do if she reached up and touched the marks she’d left on his throat, where the skin was livid with clotted blood. His blood, her blood. No way now to tell the difference.

 _To find someone to love,_ he’d said, somewhere far away, long ago, when she’d asked him mockingly what his plan had been. _To find someone to love, and hope that she’d love me back._ He hadn’t understood the first thing about humanity, or about love, or about her. About any of it.

Through the mesh of her fingers, she could just see the last of the twilight catching at the river as it twisted and fell, endlessly, into the trap.

He laid the ax down and took her hands, folding them in his, warming the chilled backs. She shrugged closer into the blanket, feeling the heat of him, the contained stillness, waiting.

“It’s not a metaphor, Kara,” he said, just audible above the crackling of the fire. “None of this is a metaphor. It's just…it's just life.”

The escarpment opposite was invisible now, the half-finished cabin and the twin graves lost in the gathering night. The river fell and went on falling, darkness into darkness, and the flames leapt higher.

 

 

 


End file.
